Rich Snippets: What Are These and How to Optimize Them?

Search engine optimization has long proven itself to be one of the most powerful marketing approaches for driving growth and sales. With its help, businesses can grow their online visibility and make sure that their prospects find them organically. So, without any doubt, SEO is a must for every company today.

Now, while most of us are well-familiar with conventional optimization tactics, such as keyword research, content optimization, link-building, and others, what about rich snippets SEO?

In this guide, we’ll tell you what rich snippets are and how you can optimize them for greater search engine optimization results!

What Is a Rich Snippet?

Rich search snippets are standard links displayed in Google’s search engine result pages (SERPs) but extended with additional data attributed to them. The extra information is shown under the link’s meta description and can include many types of data, such as:

Ratings and reviews;
Product details like availability and prices;
Recipe info like cooking time, ingredients, and other;
Event details;
Links to important related pages;
Frequently asked questions;
How-to instructions;
Business/person info, etc.

How Do Rich Snippets Work and Affect SEO?

The extra info displayed in enhanced results is drawn from the site. However, while pretty much every site provides relevant additional information about its business, products, services, events, or content, not all of them implement structured data markup. Structured markup is made of bits of code that Google uses to better understand the website and its content. The information Google pulls from the site, thanks to markup, is then used to give it a richer appearance in SERPs.

Okay, but how does this affect your SEO? While enhanced results don’t directly affect your rankings, rich snippets SEO optimization is important for a reason. To understand why, answer a simple question – how much traffic does your site receive? You can easily track it using a reliable website daily traffic checker to tell whether your site drives enough visitors to help your business grow.

And what about your click-through rate (CTR)? How many people who see your link in SERPs actually click on it?

If both your daily traffic volume and CTR are reasonably low, your SEO isn’t working to its best ability. Moreover, Google measures a website’s click-through rate to assess the overall quality of the result. So, both traffic and CTR matter to your rankings. They can be improved with the help of search snippets that give users additional info and thus make your links look more appealing and click-worthy.

Implementing Structured Data Markup

So you already know how to create rich snippets – with the help of structured data markup.

Before we move on to specific snippet optimization tips, let us briefly guide you to implementing markup on your site:

Open Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper Tool to handle the process easier.
Pick a specific type of data you want to mark up from the offered list (e.g., an article, event, product, Q A page, etc.).
Paste the URL of the page you want to mark up.
Go through your page and mark its different elements with relevant tags.
Click the “Create HTML” button.
Copy and paste the generated HTML code into the <head> section of the specific page’s HTML.
Go to Google’s Rich Results Test tool and enter your URL to test newly added markup. The tool will show you detected markup, as well as errors and warnings that you might want to fix.

Rich Snippets SEO Optimization by Type

Once you add markup, Google will be able to understand your pages better and pull extra information to enhance your results in SERPs.

Now, let’s see how you can optimize each particular type of Google snippet for more clicks:

Product

Enhance your product pages with up-to-date and accurate product property data, such as:

The exact product name;
High-quality and appealing image (no less than 1200px wide);
Indicate the price and currency;
Specify the availability status (i.e., in stock, out of stock, or available for pre-order);
Specify the product’s rating and the number of reviews.

Review

Ensure the availability of the key review properties:

Review rating (can only be from 1 to 5);
Product or service that was reviewed;
Author’s name;
Publishing date;
The entire body of the review.

Recipe

Optimize your page to include the following elements:

A descriptive and clear recipe name;
Author;
Relevant recipe category and cuisine;
Serving size;
A brief list of ingredients;
Average cooking time and total time (including preparation);
Nutritional value table;
Step-by-step instructions for preparation and cooking;
High-resolution image of the dish (a video instruction would be a plus);
Recipe rating and the number of reviews;
List of keywords that describe the recipe.

FAQ

To get FAQ rich snippets, pick the FAQ page as a type of data when creating markup. To prepare your page for getting into FAQ rich snippets, implement the following tips:

Brainstorm relevant questions that your prospects might be interested in;
Check your competitors’ FAQ pages for inspiration;
For every FAQ element, provide a short and straightforward question and give a detailed but brief answer (and mark it up accordingly).

Event

To make your page eligible for this kind of result, make sure to include and mark up the following key data:

Event name;
Location and venue (for online events, too, use the “VirtualLocation” tag);
Event mode (i.e., online, offline, or mixed);
Start and end dates with time;
Organizer name and other information;
Event status (e.g., scheduled, postponed, or canceled);
Featured performers and their details (if applicable);
High-resolution associated image;
Detailed description that gives users more information about the event;
Ticket-related details, such as ticket availability, prices, and currency.

CTR SEO: Content Improvement Tips

If you aim for higher CTR, simply getting into search snippets is not enough to encourage more people to click on your link. To do this, you need to strategically improve your content.

Here are a few tips that can help:

Regularly audit and update the data on your pages to ensure its accuracy. This is especially crucial for product results that demonstrate prices and availability – these should always be up-to-date.
Optimize your pages with high-quality visuals (at least 1200px). Use popular image formats like WebP or JPEGs and provide descriptive alt text for greater accessibility and image SEO.
Craft compelling, unique, and intriguing meta tags and descriptions that encourage users to click. Keep them under 60 characters for titles and under 160 characters for descriptions to ensure full visibility on all devices. And don’t forget to integrate your primary target keywords both into titles and descriptions.

Continuous Monitoring and Improving

Once you get into enhanced results and handle the first stages of snippet SEO, don’t stop there. Continuously monitor your key performance metrics, such as organic traffic and CTR, as these can hint at the effectiveness of your links in SERPs.

Generally, a good click-through rate for a business site (regardless of the result type) is between 11% and 12%. If your CTR is lower, consider adjusting your meta tags and descriptions to gain more clicks.

If you are optimizing enhanced results for videos, you need to measure the results slightly differently. Besides monitoring the general CTR, you should also track impression click-through rate (a metric that assesses how frequently users watch a video after seeing a registered impression). What is a good impression click through rate, you may wonder? – The average impression CTR (considered good) is between 2% and 10%.

Conclusion

Though getting into a Google snippet won’t directly affect your ranking, it can help your search engine optimization and overall business growth in multiple ways. First of all, it implies that search engines can understand your pages better, which is important for appropriate ranking. Secondly, rich snippets give users more information about your page, increasing the likelihood of them clicking on it from SERPs.

All in all, optimizing your enhanced results can help you boost your traffic, CTR, and rankings. Use the CTR SEO tips we shared with you here to get started!